Software: Firefox, GTK3, Wireshark, PacVim and GNOME

Frequent crashes, slow performance, and not being able to find the tab you’re looking for—we’ve all been there. Here are some of the best Firefox extensions for helping you manage tab overload.

Generally, we don’t recommend using any extensions you don’t have to—they can be a privacy nightmare. But until makers of browsers build in some better tab management solutions, we tab hoarders have to rely on extensions to keep us sane. We’ve rounded up some of the best extensions for managing tabs in Firefox. And, while there are a ton of these extensions out there (and everyone has their favorites), we’ve tried to keep our list to well-regarded extensions without reported privacy issues.

Marker is a free and open source GTK3 Markdown editor designed with the Gnome desktop in mind. While the application is still in early development, it already includes most of the things you'd need in a Markdown editor.

Wireshark has a TON of features and I definitely only use a small fraction of its features. The 5 tricks I’ve described here are probably 95% of what I use Wireshark for – you only need to know a little Wireshark to start using it to debug networking issues!

Although Vim (short for VI Improved) is a popular text editor on Linux systems, people still find it hard to learn, it has a steep learning curve especially the advanced features; a lot of Linux newbies are literally afraid of learning this powerful and highly recommended text editor.

On the other hand, so much effort has been directed by the Tecmint and Linux community towards making Vim easy to learn; from creating Vim tutorials, sharing useful Vim usage tricks and tips, to developing interactive learning web-apps and command-line games such as PacVim.

I’ve always felt at odds with the fact that I’m not able to use the same facilities for blog post creation as for programming. Looking back at my old posts, I’ve actually started out in 2005 with a command line tool that allowed me to easily upload simple text passages for planet aggregation.

I later started running my own Wordpress instance with full fledged online editing which turned out to be fairly entertaining in the beginning. But I never went back to produce posts as frequently as was the case when I had my command line tool.

These days, any content I’m working on needs to be tracked in a local Git repository. I want to diff, merge, rebase changes and edit things in-place in Emacs and a terminal. Not being able to utilize my familiar editing environment has really thwarted my efforts to blog even semi-regularly.

For the above and a plethora of other reasons, I’ve long wanted to move away from venerable Wordpress and any kind of dynamic website management, that includes the Mediawiki instance that used to be hosted on Testbit. Both served a role at some point, but lately the Wiki became more of an archive for old works and the blog felt more and more like a maintenance burden and writing block.

For a long time now Games has had a very basic UI, displaying only a collection of games. Having already had added the developer key to Games, I chose to add a developer view, displaying collection of games by developer. Along with the developer view a platform view was also added to display collection of games by platforms. A GtkStackSwitcher was added to the header bat to easily navigate between these views.

Back when Huawei introduced the EROFS Linux file-system earlier this year, there wasn't any open-source user-space utility for actually making EROFS file-systems. Even when EROFS was merged into the mainline tree, the user-space utility was still non-existent but now that issue has been rectified.

Heterogeneous Memory Management is the effort going on for more than four years that was finally merged to the mainline Linux kernel last year but is still working on adding additional features and improvements. HMM is what allows for allowing the mirroring of process address spaces, system memory to be transparently used by any device process, and other functionality for GPU computing as well as other device/driver purposes.
Jerome Glisse at Red Hat who has spearheaded Heterogeneous Memory Management from the start presented at last week's Linux Plumbers Conference on this unified memory solution.

Now I am close to complete one year of Linux Kernel, and one question still bugs me: why does it have to be so hard for someone in a similar condition to become part of this world? I realized that I had great support from many people (especially from my sweet and calm wife) and I also pushed myself very hard. Now, I feel that it is time to start giving back something to society; as a result, I began to promote some small events about free software in the university and the city I live. However, my main project related to this started around two months ago with six undergraduate students at the University of Sao Paulo, IME [3]. My plan is simple: train all of these six students to contribute to the Linux Kernel with the intention to help them to create a local group of Kernel developers. I am excited about this project! I noticed that within a few weeks of mentoring the students they already learned lots of things, and in a few days, they will send out their contributions to the Kernel. I want to write a new post about that in December 2018, reporting the results of this new tiny project and the summary of this one year of Linux Kernel. See you soon :)

Collabora developer Scott Anderson sent out a "request for comments" patch series that would add a Secure Output Protocol to the Wayland space.
The Secure Output Protocol is for allowing a Wayland client to tell the compositor to only display if it's going to a "secure" output, such as for HDCP-like (High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection) configurations, but there is no mandate at the protocol level about what is the definition of secure -- if anything.
This does not impose any DRM per se by Wayland but is mostly intended for set-top-boxes and other closed systems where a Wayland client can reasonably trust the compositor. The Wayland Secure Output Protocol is based upon the work done by Google on their Chromium Wayland code.

Best Linux Desktop Environments: Strong and Stable

A desktop environment is a collection of disparate components that integrate together. They bundle these components to provide a common graphical user interface with elements such as icons, toolbars, wallpapers, and desktop widgets. Additionally, most desktop environments include a set of integrated applications and utilities.
Desktop environments (now abbreviated as DE) provide their own window manager, system software that controls the placement and appearance of windows within a windowing system. They also provide a file manager which organizes, lists, and locates files and directories. Other aspects include a background provider, a panel to provide a menu and display information, as well as a setting/configuration manager to customize the environment.
Ultimately, a DE is a piece of software. While they are more complicated than most other types of software, they are installed in the same way.

KDE neon upgrade - From 16.04 to 18.04

I am quite happy with the KDE neon upgrade, going from the 16.04 to the 18.04 base. I think it's good on several levels, including improved hardware support and even slightly better performance. Plus there were no crashes or regressions of any kind, always a bonus. This means that neon users now have a fresh span of time to enjoy their non-distro distro, even though it's not really committing to any hard dates, so the LTS is also only sort of LTS in that sense. It's quite metaphysical.
On a slightly more serious note, this upgrade was a good, positive experience. I semi-accidentally tried to ruin it, but the system recovered remarkably, the post-upgrade results are all sweet, and you have a beautiful, fast Plasma desktop, replete with applications and dope looks and whatnot. I'm happy, and we shall bottle that emotion for when the need arises, and in the Linux world it does happen often, I shall have an elixir of rejuvenation to sip upon. KDE neon, a surprisingly refined non-distro distro.

It’s been some time since I last talked with you about business logic engines and using them in application development cloud architectures. At that time, I showcased running JBoss BRMS in a container on Red Hat OpenShift. This gives you the cloud experience, one that’s portable across private and public clouds, but on your own local laptop using Red Hat Container Development Kit.
The world continues to move forward, a new product has been released which replaced JBoss BRMS with the Red Hat Decision Manager, so now I want to provide a way for you to install this on OpenShift, in the same easy to use demo format.

In August 2017, I participated in a cross-departmental design thinking session with our Global Services vice president, John Allessio, our vice president of marketing communications, Leigh Day, and numerous other leaders from our design, brand and marketing teams. After a face-to-face, all-day session where ideas burst out of our collective heads left and right, one thing was certain: we were collectively passionate about using open source technology, along with Open Innovation Labs’ focus on people and process, to help solve the world’s grand challenges and to positively impact people in need. We just needed to find the right project to prove it would work.
Fast-forward to New York City, late that same year. I was attending Red Hat Forum, an amazing event where our customers, partners and communities come together to share what we’re doing, and find new ways to leverage Red Hat to great advantage. I presented on Open Innovation Labs and talked with Red Hat users from Cigna, Marriott, Deutsche Bank, and more.

Last month, along with more than 12,000 Red Hat co-workers across the globe, I celebrated We Are Red Hat Week. It's a special time for us to recognize and honor the values and spirit that make Red Hat truly unique.
At Red Hat, our mission is to serve as the catalyst in communities of customers, contributors, and partners making better technology the open source way. We're unabashedly an open organization, which means we excel by – as our CEO Jim Whitehurst puts it in his book, "The Open Organization" – "engaging participative communities both inside and out."

Expected to arrive next year on February, LibreOffice 6.2 will be the second semi-major update to the LibreOffice 6 office suite series, bringing a bunch of enhancements and new features to make your daily office tasks easier and more enjoyable. One of these new features is an optional UI design called the Notebookbar.
The Notebookbar UI is included in the beta version of LibreOffice 6.2 if you want to take it for a test drive (details below), along with the KDE Plasma 5 integration and numerous other improvements we talked about in a previous article. Of course, LibreOffice 6.2 will also include lots of stability and reliability updates.